The Billionaire

Every time you hear that sound, god has created another billionaire. Mark Cuban is number 199.

FORTY STORIES OVER DALLAS, A GLEAMING ATRIUM, THE SKY LOBBY AT the Petroleum Club. A bumptious guy in Bally loafers holds court before a rapt semicircle of Harvard Business School alumni. Bankers and lawyers, cattlemen and oil execs, they've cleared their calendars and paid twenty dollars each to hear him speak. They crowd around him like schoolboys around a pro quarterback, hands reaching, faces aglow, like pilgrims around a prophet, a messenger from the promised land of three-comma personal worth.

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"How you doing there, Mark?" drawls a sixtyish man in a gray suit, easing his way to the front.

"Just tryin' to keep out of trouble," says Mark Cuban, shrugging his shoulders. Six feet two and 205 pounds, with a heavy brow and a crooked grin, a silk-knit pullover clinging nicely to the health-club topography of his shoulders, he does look a bit like a quarterback, the kind who's just found out he's going to Disney World. His friends call him Cubes. "Your buddy in The Wall Street Journal tells a great story about you ordering a Gulfstream," says the man in gray, referring to a piece in this morning's paper.

"You got to have the plane," says a man in pinstripes.

"Absolutely!" affirms another man.

"Did you consider one of those share planes?" inquires another.

"I did," says Cuban. "But then I thought: What's the reason to buy it? And the answer was: Because I can."

Forty-one years old, a few degrees south of handsome, Mark Cuban is a recent addition to the Forbes 400 list of the nation's wealthiest, ranked 199, higher than Ed Bass and Barry Diller, just below Donald Trump and Charles Wang. His personal worth today totals about $2.5 billion. Two thousand, five hundred million dollars--enough to spend a million a day, every day, for almost seven years. Not bad for a guy who started his career in business selling garbage bags door-to-door. His nickname back then was Pudgy. His date to the senior prom was a cold call.

On this blustery afternoon in early winter, with the market surfing another tsunami, Cubes has about him the air of a man complete, or nearly so, a man who is feeling pretty darn good about himself just now, as if he knew all along his life would someday come to this: his thumb hooked casually over his alligator belt, his ultralight Sony VAIO notebook computer cradled under his arm, a bevy of fawning Ivy League admirers surrounding him, basking in the hot light of the fabulous possibility he embodies. If he could do it, they are figuring, they can, too. They lean forward almost imperceptibly, hanging on his every word, straining for some pearl, some crust, some clue.

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"So you really ordered a GV by e-mail?" asks the man in the gray suit.

"Sure," says Cubes. "I sent them an e-mail and told them I wanted to test-ride it and check it out first, and if I liked it I would buy it. And they were like, 'Excuse me, who are you again?' "

"So what did you say?"

"I said: 'I'm a guy who's gonna write you a check for $40 million, that's who I am.' "

"I have my little list of toys," says Cubes, smirking like a rowdy frat boy on spring break, a role he played frequently during his college days, a role he hasn't quite outgrown. "It was one of the three things I wanted. The first was the house. The second was the plane."

ELEVEN IN THE MORNING, SUNNY AND COOL. BIRDS SING IN the bare trees of Preston Hollow, a storied North Dallas neighborhood also known as the Golden Corridor. Deep lots, Corinthian columns, high walls and stone chimneys, old money and new, the pickup trucks and step vans of maintenance workers parked everywhere, tender craft servicing a landlocked fleet. Outside an imposing iron gate, you push a button on a call box. You wait.

Leaves skitter across the quiet streets. Traffic drones in the distance, an undertrack of white noise, a faint smell of exhaust. A long black limo rolls past. A Humvee. A pair of red Porsches. Dot-com Dallas: a city with many past lives--cattle, oil, real estate, software--a city yet again reborn. Through the ornate scrollwork of the gate, you can see down the cobbled drive, past the carriage house and guard station to the brand-new French Renaissance--style house, cast stone with a slate roof--a baronial twenty-four-thousand-square-foot mansion hunkered down upon seven lush acres of wooded grounds, complete with a guesthouse, a wine cellar, an eight-car garage, and, by the pool, a three-story party pavilion crowned with a stately Jeffersonian rotunda. Gas lamps flicker outside the front portico. The waters of a fountain dance serenely in the center of the circular driveway, where sits Cubes's black '96 Lexus SUV, along with a golf cart and several cars. Gardeners are fanned out across the property, planting ground cover, finishing the job the previous owner left undone, after two years and $20 million. Once a national leader in home-mortgage refinancing, he's facing bankruptcy now--another time, another IPO, another bubble. Cubes paid $15 million for the place. The moment he took possession, he made $5 million. You push the button on the call box once again.

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At last the gates swing slowly inward. You drive in, park, climb several steps past a pair of stone urns. The double front doors are massive, carved mahogany, twelve feet tall, reminiscent of a castle. One door is cracked open a few inches. As you step in, pushing with some effort, you are greeted by the unmistakable sonic assault of the custom-built, club-quality sound system that Cubes has just installed throughout the house, on the basketball court, by the pool--the heart-thumping, earsplitting decibel rave of vintage funk bouncing off the white hand-cut-marble floors, swirling around the apex of the dramatic three-story entryway, vibrating the crystal teardrops of an immense chandelier that overhangs the only piece of furniture in evidence, a large rectangular dining table with room for at least twenty: George Clinton's Hey Man ... Smell My Finger.

Cubes boogies over in jeans and stocking feet. "What did I tell you?" he shouts, a guy in a nightclub trying to be heard. "Is this the fuckin' greatest?" He does a little dance, eyes shut, head bopping. "Were you out there long?"

He pops a spin, a neat 540, then skates across the slick floor toward a doorway, hand aloft, finger waggling, the boogie-woogie billionaire. Back in college, before he bought the bar, before the bar was closed down by authorities for staging wet-T-shirt contests--or rather, for awarding first prize one night to a sixteen-year-old who was on probation for prostitution--Cubes hired himself out as a dance instructor, teaching the bump and the hustle. As a youth, despite his husky size, Cubes studied ballroom dancing, Russian dance, and ballet. He took piano lessons, played football and basketball, engaged in marathon wrestling matches with his younger brothers, meanwhile maintaining a thriving business in door-to-door sales--fire extinguishers, magazine subscriptions, Junior Achievement serving trays. An avid stamp and coin collector, he put himself through his first two years of college with the proceeds of his hobbies.

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From an early age, Cubes was a super salesman, with the gift of gab and a winning way, a nose for a hidden vein, a firm conviction that it was nearly impossible to turn down a kid who knocked on your door with a useful product. As he always told his middle brother: "You don't need the showroom to sell the Cadillac." A fierce competitor, a rabid sports fan--the kind of guy who likes to sit courtside and yell at the refs and the players, who takes particular glee when one of them turns and glares--Cubes has never seen money as the ultimate end. It's great, sure, and he's been doing an excellent job lately of spending it, having written checks for more than $60 million over the last two months for various toys. But like Gordon Gekko in Wall Street, one of his favorite movies, Cubes sees business as something far more epic than the story of the bottom line. Business, like life, is strictly a matter of winners and losers, he believes. Somebody wins and somebody loses and everything else flows from that. Part Andrew Carnegie, part Peter Pan, Cubes is a man who marches to his own perverse little tune. He takes great pride in doing things, as he says, backasshalfwards--things like moving into a college fraternity house during his senior year of high school, or ordering a $40 million Gulfstream V jet by e-mail, or buying a twenty-four-thousand-square-foot mansion and leaving it nearly empty of furniture. His motto, his philosophy, his raison d'être, can be summed up in three little words: Because I can. As they said in the movie Risky Business, another of his all-time favorites, "Sometimes you gotta say, 'What the fuck.' "

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Cubes skates on across the floor, through a doorway, eventually reaching the restaurant-sized kitchen. It is an awesome room, with every available amenity and gadget and fixture. The house can be accessed by computer from anywhere in the world. Cubes can even call up the security cams. He hasn't lived here long, but the possibilities for that little wrinkle seem endless, he says with a wink. Living in such grand circumstances hasn't really changed his life much, he says, pointing to his propensity for playing Wiffle ball with his buddies in the formal living room. He does admit that he's had to alter his habits somewhat. For instance, he's begun taking a bottle of water to bed with him. It's just too far to hike in the middle of the night. Ditto eating in bed, heretofore his custom. By the time he makes himself a plate in the kitchen and carries it back to the master suite, the food is gone and he has to reverse his steps and return the plate. And while he has always preferred to rise in the morning, make himself a bowl of high-fiber cereal, and sit naked in front of his computer, answering his e-mail, he has found the house to be a bit drafty.

Had Cubes moved into this house ten years ago, things might have been very different. They'd have had to close down all the strip joints in Dallas, he muses, because all the girls in town would have been working for him right here. As it is, he's had great fun initiating each and every room of the place. In deference to his pretty blond girlfriend--a twenty-seven-year-old Dallas-born advertising exec named Tiffany Stewart--he declines to give the specifics of that fun-filled weekend, except to mumble something about little blue pills. Cubes is devoted to Tiff. Sometimes he thinks he ought to get married, ought to have kids. It's not like the old days, when every night was a party. But, hell. As a friend of his put it recently, Cubes has in his possession that ultimate cologne, eau de wallet. There are a lot of ways to define "conquest." Settle down? Have fun? Who knows? It's an interesting time in his life, to say the least.

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Now, in the kitchen, Cubes grabs an elaborate remote, tones down the sound, turns to the business at hand, a conference with his assistant, Stacy, and a guy named Bob, a wardrobe consultant from Lombardo Custom Apparel.

Cubes walked into the store a while back on a lark, thinking he'd buy some custom threads. Looking around, he realized he didn't know what he liked. "Just give me one of everything," he told them. By the time he left the store, he'd placed an order for $80,000. He'd always wanted a closet like Richard Gere's in American Gigolo. Now he has one--row upon row of shirts and pants, sport coats and suits, all of it hanging neatly, arranged by hue. Some of the stuff will eventually be shipped to his two other residences, a house in Manhattan Beach, California, and a studio apartment on Central Park West. You know you've really made it when you can travel without luggage.

"So where were we?" asks Cubes.

"Shoes," says Bob. His mission, he says, is to make Cubes more "wardrobe mature." Cubes has responded nicely. This morning he placed an order for thirty-seven pairs of shoes, in various styles, for $12,000.

"I wear 11 1/2 ."

"Right. 11 1/2 D."

"And the clothes--just keep on bringing the shit like you do and I'll just--"

"Just weed 'em out and tell me what you don't want," says Bob, interrupting. "And I made up some shirts for you--on me. I think you'll really like them."

"Did you see that picture of me in the paper on Sunday? I was wearing all your stuff."

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"I appreciate that," says Bob. "So you're in good shape with belts?"

"Yeah, belts are cool."

"But you need knits."

"Yeah, the knits, and also something fun. I need some fun clothes and more solids. I like solids. And something bizarre, you know, something superfunky."

"I'll see what I can do," says Bob, looking puzzled.

"What about socks?" asks Stacy, in the mother-hen tone of the highly effective personal assistant. "He's always out of socks, and then he's bugging me."

For the longest time, Cubes didn't wear socks, one of his many superstitions. When he was jetting around the country pushing the IPO, he had lucky pants, a lucky shirt, lucky shoes. Cubes is a great believer in the "butterfly effect--the notion that one little action can change the karma." He's a big tipper ($150 on a $250 check), a patron of charities (particulars off the record). He still has the same cheap desk and credenza he bought when he started his first business. He still owns the first house he ever bought, and the first warehouse, on the outside wall of which is painted a mural depicting the high points of his life--Cubes lofting a big trophy after a college rugby tournament; Cubes in Red Square, when he was teaching business to the budding new capitalists; Cubes at dinner with his parents and his two younger brothers; Cubes wearing a T-shirt, upon which his girlfriend had scrawled, "I want you to pin my legs back like a Safeway chicken"; Cubes and his friends partying in Vegas, in Acapulco, in Puerto Vallarta, at the Final Four in New Orleans, at the Dream Team finals in Barcelona.

At his parents' house in Pittsburgh, Cubes keeps a pair of size 38 jeans from ninth grade, when he was five feet eight and 210 pounds and had silver caps on his bottom teeth. On a numbered Web site, he keeps hundreds of snapshots, with file names like "drunk and happy on 40th birthday" and "foxxxy lady." On a shelf in the closet of his home office, he keeps the tortoiseshell Coke-bottle glasses he used to wear before he got contacts. Last year, he finally had corrective laser surgery. When the doctor finished and Cubes looked across the room for the first time and could see clearly the outline of the light switch on the wall, well ... it was amazing, incredible, unfuckingbelievable. It was one of those moments, a defining moment, something he will never forget. Like the moment he turned the key in the front door and walked into his bar for the first time, a twenty-one-year-old college senior in possession of a state-issued liquor license. Or the moment he became a billionaire--1:16 p.m. EST, January 8, 1999. Or the moment, sitting at a bar in the airport, having a celebratory beer after the sale to Yahoo was announced, that his image appeared on the TV news and everyone in the bar noticed. Or the moment he climbed aboard his Gulfstream for his inaugural flight. Or the moment yesterday afternoon when he cranked up his new sound system for the first time and felt the house fairly lift off the ground, fairly hover, a booming chorus of "Atomic Dog" that made him want to dance, to shout, to throw a fist in the air and scream, Yeahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh baaaaaaa-byyyyyyy! Tears of joy welled in his eyes; he actually cried--a deep, wrenching, singular sob.

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Cubes knows full well that he's a lucky motherfucker. He's forty-one years old. He's a bachelor. He's on the Forbes list, for chrissakes! He's doing what he likes, how he likes, when he likes, all because he can. Sometimes you gotta say, What the fuck. He'd have to be pretty stupid to lose $2.5 billion. He could lose a billion and still be golden. Hell, he could lose two billion. Nevertheless, Cubes is no fool. Most of his wealth is on paper. You never know what life holds, and he is acutely aware of that mystical fact, and he takes care not to anger the gods. In his wallet he keeps a lucky penny. He picked it up off the street in New York on the day in 1998 that his company, Broadcast.com, went public. Since then, he has never picked up another. He wants someone else to be able to find a lucky penny, too.

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"He has plenty of socks," says Bob.

"I'm trusting you on this," says Stacy, shaking a finger in his direction. A frenetic, dark-haired young woman with a sweet Beaumont drawl, Stacy's been working for Cubes for three years, his loyal gal Friday. She keeps his schedule, makes his bed, runs the house, pays his bills, stocks the refrigerator with his preferred staples--precooked chicken breasts, yogurt, diet Snapple, Lite Ice beer, Ragú Light, sport-top bottles of spring water. Though Stacy prefers going to the store herself, Cubes has lately got her ordering household supplies off the Web. He wants her to do the same with groceries, but she has resisted. It's triple value on coupons on Wednesdays, she keeps reminding him. Waste not, want not, you know?

Despite her tendency toward frugality, Stacy made a killing when Broadcast.com went public, as did many of Cubes's other employees. She doesn't really have to work. But she loves the job, the excitement, all of it. Never a dull moment at Cuban Crest, as she likes to call the house.

"Not really. Just more casual stuff, and stuff I don't have to worry about trying to match. And I need more--"

The phone rings and Cubes stops midsentence. He moves for it, then hesitates, then looks at Stacy. She picks it up on the third ring.

"It's the guy," she says cryptically, cupping her hand over the receiver. "About the thing."

"I'll take it in the office," says Cubes, skating out of the room in stocking feet.

IF YOU ARE LOOKING FOR A CLUE, YOU COULD SAY IT ALL began with a pair of basketball shoes. You remember the kind: suede Pumas--the lust object of preteen jocks in the early seventies, the Rosebud of our tale. Norton Cuban was an auto upholsterer, the son of a Russian-Jewish immigrant named Chobanisky, a proud man of modest means who was not about to spend twenty-five dollars on a pair of sneakers. "When you make your own money, you can do whatever you want," the father told the twelve-year-old.

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Cubes stood there a moment, wheels turning. "Whatever I want?" he asked.

And so began the garbage-bag route, which begat the notion: Because I can. By his junior year of high school in Pittsburgh, he was taking a psychology class at the University of Pittsburgh. By his senior year, he was a full-time college student. Deciding to transfer to a good undergraduate business program, he looked at the list of the top ten in the nation and chose Indiana, the least expensive. He was paying his own way.

IU was a blast. He lost weight, joined the rugby team, started getting dates. "My first two years, my mission was to be the wildest guy on campus who didn't drink," says Cubes. "I wanted to be different, I guess. I wanted to stand out. I'd tell myself, Just pretend you're drunk and do what everybody else does, only I'll be the sober one doing it. I was like the Steve Martin character, one wild and crazy guy."

By junior year, the stamp-and-coin money was gone. Cubes was living on loans and a twenty-dollar-a-week allowance from his folks. Looking to make some extra cash, he began giving dance lessons, then hit upon the idea of throwing big disco parties, late-seventies versions of raves. Eventually, he was renting out the Bloomington National Guard armory, hosting three thousand rowdy students at three bucks a head. His senior year, Cubes bought an off-campus nightclub. He called it Motley's Pub. There were thirty thousand students at IU. Motley's was the place to go. Five-dollar all-you-can-drink Wednesdays, quarter-a-drink Thursdays, free kegs at midnight, Cubes spinning the records, dancing like a dervish, buying drinks all around. He'd end the evenings covered in sweat, rolling in dough, a babe on his arm. Everything went great for nine months. Then came the incident with the sixteen-year-old. His bar days were over.

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Cubes went home to Pittsburgh after graduation, took a job with Mellon Bank. It turned out to be a key move. Mellon was converting from manual to automated banking systems. Cubes was on the team. Within a year, he was an expert in computers.

Tired of the bank job, Cubes decided to relocate. The year was 1982, and Dallas was booming. Twenty-somethings from all over the nation were flocking in, looking for opportunity, on the make. He moved into an apartment with six other guys. He got a job selling software.

"I could always sell," Cubes remembers, "and the beautiful thing about the industry was that it was brand-new. Lotus 1-2-3 had just come out. The IBM PC had just been out a little while, you know, with the single and double disk drive. I'd read all the trade magazines, I'd get the manuals and read them. I'd come to work early and just sit on the computer--I didn't have one of my own yet--and I'd teach myself. There was nobody who walked in who could say they knew more than me. I started building up a little customer base. I wanted to do more. I remember asking the guy who owned the place if I could go out and sell to my customers instead of waiting for them to come into the store. And he says, 'As long as you're here by 9:30 to sweep the floor, you can do whatever you want.' "

Cubes left a few months later. Armed with his Rolodex, he set up his own consulting business, MicroSolutions. He taught himself how to write programs, became an expert in connecting computers into local area networks. By the time he sold the company to CompuServe in 1990, he had eighty-five employees, clients such as Neiman Marcus and Zales, a run rate of about $30 million a year. After splitting the proceeds of the sale with his partner and his employees--an eyebrow-raising act at the time--Cubes became a multimillionaire. He decided to retire. He was thirty-one.

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His first act of retirement, he says, was to spend $125,000 for a lifetime pass on American Airlines, and his first trip took him to California to visit a friend. Walking down the strand in Manhattan Beach one day, Cubes saw a house for rent, a big five-bedroom place on the beach. He took it. That night at dinner, he ran into two flight attendants. They were honeys. They needed a place to live.

So began the Hollywood years. He lived the life, dated the babes, went to the beach, took advantage of his airline pass, visiting eleven different countries. He enrolled in acting classes, appeared in two movies. One, Talking About Sex, starred Kim Wayans. You can catch it now and then on cable. He declines to name the other movie.

While waiting for his star to rise, Cubes began playing the stock market. He'd awaken at 6:30 a.m., turn on CNBC, get on his StairMaster, pick up the phone. "I was popping trades left and right. My roommates were amazed. Everybody was being a starving actor, but I didn't want to starve. I figured I'd do it backasshalfwards, you know, like always. I was making something like $30,000 to $40,000 a week."

In 1994, Cubes moved back to Dallas to reunite with an old flame, the Safeway-chicken girl. Meanwhile, an acquaintance from college, Dallas attorney Todd Wagner, approached him with an idea: What if you could use the Web to access, say, live IU basketball games from anywhere in the world? Both men had been to parties where big games were broadcast over makeshift speakers via telephone. Why not provide it on demand through the Web, home-team sports for homesick fans--the World Series in Kathmandu; the Final Four in Micronesia; opening day at the local ballpark to your cubicle in the corporate hive. Though early naysayers decried the high-tech idiocy of turning a $3,000 PC into a $6 AM radio, market research showed Cubes and Wagner that fewer than one third of white-collar workers actually had radios on their desks; even fewer had televisions. Almost all of them, however, had PCs, and within a few years, they predicted, almost all of them would have Internet connections as well. A huge, untapped legion of upscale eyes and ears was ripe for the taking. This was where the Web was going--from static text to real-time audio and video. This was where entertainment was going--from network programming to multimedia multiple choice, all of it on demand.

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The partners began their venture in the spare bedroom of Cubes's Dallas house, with a Packard Bell computer, an ISDN line, a cheap AM radio tuner, and an agreement with a Dallas radio station that allowed Cubes to broadcast the station's programming over the Web. Though Cubes secured the rights with bold talk of making KLIF into a sort of TBS of the Internet, a radio superstation, things didn't start so auspiciously. One afternoon in the early going, they went off the air when Wagner tripped over a power cord. Within months, however, the bugs were exterminated and the company was occupying a downtown warehouse, having secured agreements with dozens of radio stations and other content providers, adding more every week. Soon, Motorola, Intel, and Yahoo came on as investors. Cubes put in well over a million dollars himself. Within four years, AudioNet--later renamed Broadcast.com--was the leading aggregator and broadcaster of live and on-demand audio and video programs in the world. "It's cable on steroids," Cubes liked to crow as he crisscrossed the country, flying more than half a million miles--the lifetime pass!--to drum up business and buzz, to sell his vision, a whole new way of using the Internet. Early on, a business component was also added to the mix: live, on-demand broadcasts of company-specific programming--conference calls on steroids.

Accessed by half a million users daily, Broadcast.com carried live shows from four hundred radio stations and thirty TV stations around the country. By clicking onto the site from anywhere in the world for the price of a local phone call, users could watch or listen to sports, hometown news, the Super Bowl, the Stanley Cup, police-scanner and air-traffic channels from major cities, the BBC World Service, a jukebox of twenty-one hundred full-length compact discs and four hundred audio books. In September 1998, one million users tuned in to Broadcast.com to see President Clinton's videotaped grand-jury testimony, a record number eclipsed several months later when almost two million people clicked onto its live coverage of a Victoria's Secret fashion show. Though Broadcast.com wasn't yet showing a profit, it was distinguished by a unique strategy: Rather than spend his money on advertising, as did most new Internet companies, Cubes put feet on the street. More than one third of his employees were in sales. Cubes never set year-end goals for his sales force, believing that goals were limiting. In his mind, a good salesman needs to set his sights on only one thing--the next sale.

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In July 1998, Broadcast.com went public as BCST. Six months later, when the stock reached 200--it had opened to insiders at 50 cents a share, to the public at 18 dollars--Cubes became a billionaire. Last summer, Broadcast.com was bought by Internet giant Yahoo, in a stock trade worth approximately $6 billion.

"Buying those Pumas, that was the eye-opener," says Cubes, tossing a Wilson football up in the air, lounging on a big sofa in the immense media room of his house. "I got my shoes, I got some money in the bank, and I got my freedom. I could do whatever I damn well pleased.

"I mean, some people can run to freedom. I can sell to freedom. And that's what I learned when I was a kid. Time and freedom. Those are the ultimate assets, absolutely. My self-fulfillment doesn't come from the money. It comes from just knowing that intellectually there are no bounds--that's the number-one thing. Nobody telling me what to do. Just me doing things because I can."

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THREE GUYS IN A BLACK LEXUS SUV, BARRELING down the rain-swept interstate, a Saturday night on the town, ripe with possibilities. Cubes is driving. Stahl rides shotgun. Kleine is in the back.

Friends since their early days in Dallas, when they used to make dinner out of happy-hour appetizers, Cubes and Stahl and Kleine have been digging it up and tearing it up together for years. Lately, of course, Cubes has been a little busy. The last time they all partied was Halloween. Cubes had just cashed in about $20 million worth of stock, his SEC waiting period having expired at last. To celebrate, he treated a bunch of his buddies to a Las Vegas adventure. Everyone got his own suite and cash for gambling. It was quite the party. Now they are on their way to their first scheduled stop, a Dallas Mavericks basketball game. Cubes has four seats on the floor. The players don't know him, but they know who he is--that loudmouthed guy with season tickets, superfan, always on his feet.

"Well," says Cubes, speeding through traffic, settling in to tell the tale, "I got invited down to Mar-a-Lago by this guy named Ray Manzella. You know who he is, that guru of blonds, that guy Jenny McCarthy dumped? I think he was trying to make points with Donald, so he figured he'd bring me along. So anyway, we get there, and we're sitting by the pool, drinking some drinks. You could see the house up on a higher level, and you could see people eating dinner. I'm there with Ray and his new girlfriend and Jerry Yang, the cofounder of Yahoo, and this other guy, the CEO of Visa, and we're all just hanging out. Then Donald comes by, and Ray introduces everybody. You could tell Donald didn't know any of us from Adam. He was, like, minimally cordial. And he looks around at us and he says, 'It's a shame you guys are down here. All the rich people are up there eating dinner.' "

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"Trump for president," laughs Stahl. Many years ago, when Cubes was starting MicroSolutions, the two men were walking down the street one night when Cubes asked him to become his partner in the business. Stuttering at the curveball, Stahl demurred. Cubes turned to him, slapped his cheek. "What the hell was that for?" asked Stahl. "That's your wake-up call in life, pal," Cubes told him. "When opportunity presents itself, you need to be prepared to take it." Cubes never asked again.

"So how did the meeting happen?" asks Kleine. A handsome guy with a southern drawl, he met Cubes many years ago at the health club. Cubes met Tiffany there, too.

"I guess Ray said something to Donald," says Cubes, "because a few days later I get this call: Donald wants to sit down with me. So I fly up to New York. What the hell, right? And I walk in his office and I just crack up. He's got this huge office, you know, and every square inch is covered with pictures of himself. Like a shrine to Donald, you know? He starts telling me how he's thinking about doing Trump.com, selling Trump this and Trump that, perfume and other stuff, and then he's going to take it public."

"So what did you say?" asks Kleine.

"I told him that it was one of the worst ideas I'd ever heard."

"No shit!" says Stahl, delighted.

"What'd he do?" asks Kleine.

"He looks at me funny for a minute, then he smiles and says, 'You know what? I like you!' "

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Though Cubes has been a millionaire for many years, it is nothing like being a billionaire. The toys. The respect. The status. The eau de wallet. Not so long ago, he was flying all over the country, trying to make people listen, trying to make them believe in his company, his vision, trying to get their money. These days, people call him. Wherever he goes, he is accosted by strangers. They act like they know him. They gaze at him reverently. They treat him like he's some kind of oracle. They ask him to autograph their girlfriend's left breast. They regale him with intimate financial details, solicit advice, solicit money. Everybody wants his money. Over the last few months, he's been offered an auto-racing team, a castle in France, a hockey team in rural Texas, dozens of film scripts. One guy wanted him to finance a contest offering $10 million to anyone who could build a rocket to go to another planet and return. Others just want a handout. The pitches can be pitiful: "I have this great idea for a business, but unfortunately I lost all my money gambling." Only this last group pisses him off. Fuckin' losers with excuses. He hates that, people with sorry excuses. If you're gonna do something in this life, you just have to do it.

"The one thing that hopefully I'll never lose track of is that there's no correlation between how smart you are and how much money you have," says Cubes. "Everybody has a different skill set. My skill set is in business. There's just a tune that plays in my head that makes a lot of sense to me. People were always telling me I would be rich from the time I was little. And it always scared the shit out of me. Like when I came to Dallas and I was tending bar, weighing 240 pounds. It was like, All right already, when am I going to be rich?

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"The best thing about the money, I guess, is that I don't have to prove myself anymore. There are some guys you talk to, they want to move up the list. They're like, I'm shooting for the top twenty, the top ten, whatever. I don't need to move up the fuckin' list. I'm the first to realize that my success is yesterday's news. But I'm not necessarily concerned about thinking, Can I do it again? What's more important to me is: Can I find something new that consumes me, that entertains me to the same extent, that challenges me in the same way? It's the never-ending question, I guess. What am I going to do when I grow up? What's next?"

The three men drive in silence for a few miles. The lights of Reunion Arena come into view.

"So when are you gonna buy the Mavs?" asks Stahl, joking around, making idle conversation.

"Now, that would be a great toy!" enthuses Kleine. "I want to be in charge of the cheerleaders!"

"And you ain't gonna be doin' nothin with them, either," says Cubes, speaking up at last, smirking like a forty-one-year-old billionaire with the world by the tits, a role that is still new to him, a role he is learning to play very well.

ON A SUNNY WINTER DAY A FEW WEEKS later, you turn on your computer, you check your e-mail. You have a message from Cubes:

"Since I am in the middle of a defining moment, I figured I would e-mail you.

"I am riding the plane back from San Antonio, Texas, to Dallas. The beauty is that I'm sitting here by myself, no fuss, no muss, contemplating whether or not I am going to be able to sign a letter of intent to buy an unnamed sports team this afternoon if the numbers come back like I think they will.

"Then I will go to the gym and work on my jump shot.

"Pretty damn sweet."

A few days later, The Dallas Morning News carries a banner headline: broadcast.com founder plans to buy mavericks, and a few days after that, Cubes--who will own a 70 percent stake in the basketball team when the deal is approved by the NBA--is already at work trying to revive the perennial loser.

Each day brings new reports: Cubes awarded game ball by players. Cubes entertains coach Don Nelson at his house, exacts promise that he will step down following season. Cubes goes online to chat with fans. Cubes runs up and down aisles at Reunion Arena, yelling and clapping like a cheerleader. Cubes offers free drinks to all comers at the arena's bar following games. Cubes plays rousing game of one-on-one with seven-foot German-import forward Dirk Nowitzki. Cubes presides over first home sellout of season. Cubes brings hometown boy Dennis Rodman out of retirement to play for Mavs. Cubes travels with team on the road. Cubes taunts fellow new owner Michael Jordan at a game in Washington, D. C. He tells His Airness: "We're gonna kick your butt."